Well, after years of talking about making art, I’ve finally made some art. Yesterday, I finished the homework for my watercolor class. I painted a jellyfish.

This project was fun because I got to put into practice various methods I’ve learned about during the past two weeks. Mostly, though, I tried to turn off my brain and just see the jellyfish, you know?

Our instructor recommended we use this photo from Unsplash as our reference, which I did:

Yesterday morning, I spent about thirty minutes making a small study as a sort of proof of concept. (I guess that’s probably what a study is intended to be. I’ve never thought about it before.)

I didn’t like my colors here, and I didn’t like how I messed up the background wash by fussing with it too much. So, I made some changes for my full-sized piece. The biggest change I made, though, was that I just went for it. I didn’t overthink anything. Once I started painting, I kept on painting until I had to pause to wait for the paint to dry. So much better to do things this way!

My end result isn’t perfect (in that it doesn’t completely match my vision), but I do like the outcome.

I think it’s funny that you can see certain problems in both the study and the final painting. I really wanted to add some black (or Payne’s grey) to darken the edges of the jellyfish, for example, because the reference photo has some dark spots. But every time I tried to add darker pigment, I just messed things up. Oops. They’re less messed up in the final version, though.

I’m not really complaining. For a first painting, I like this fine. I’m especially pleased with the adjustments I made to the color palette from the study to the final product. I didn’t like my colors in the small version, so thought a lot about how to mix things up. This painting is the result of eight hours of class time, maybe another eight hours of YouTube videos, and eight more hours of messing around with paint on my own. In other words, this the result of my first full 24 hours of watercolor exploration.

I didn’t intend for watercolor to be the gateway medium to my foray into art. I didn’t choose watercolor; watercolor chose me. But I have to say: It’s a hell of a lot of fun. It’s allowing me to exercise a part of my self that hasn’t been exercised since grade school. I look forward to starting my second project later today. My next assignment is to paint a still life of three eggs. It’s much more difficult than it sounds…